Dr. Michael Pakaluk delivered the 2023 Edward Cardinal Egan lecture on April 29 at the Union League Club in New York City. He spoke on the family.
We have often heard that the family is the basic cell of society. But there are two ways of understanding this claim; let us call them “compositional” and “organic.” Compositional is to think of families as basic cells the way that Congressional districts are basic cells of states. The districts have some basis in history, but mainly they are a matter of state officials imposing a division from above. Organic, in contrast, is to think of the family as a natural unit which the government respects, the way that, say, a cow is a natural unit. It is not because the government decided it that the leg and head of a cow count as belonging to the same unit. The government is not free to gerrymander a cow and count the legs of one animal and the head of another part of the same cow. A cow is a natural organism, which has its unity and life from nature. This lecture is about how it is Catholic doctrine that families are basic cells of society in this organic sense, and what follows from that teaching.
Obviously families are not single organisms the way a cow is. And yet it is Catholic teaching that husband and wife are even more of a single organism than a cow. And their offspring are not strangers, utterly distinct from them. If you were asked to decide, is the newborn baby nursing at its mother’s breast and the mother herself one natural unit or two, the better answer would be that they are one. And along these lines we see immediately that the government’s authority to separate husband and wife, or mother from children, is extremely limited if not non-existent. It must respect those unities, because it is not responsible for them in the first place.